What Rope Is For
If she lived in this world,
no longer would she murmur
about her appetite for Wyoming—
rocks, feathers, an open hand,
a conjuring. Her desire
is flamingo, a train ticket
to Aberdeen, the shiny midnight
of Hollywood starlight on paper.
And Wyoming. What she has
is a campaign button, leftover
bread crusts, a length of rope
knotted in place, its other end
circling. If she clutches its swing,
perhaps abrading her idle
hands, then she might ride
the arc high, unfist her grip,
hurl herself into the tall
plains, ranging that wide
horizon, filling herself with the glint
of minerals, flash of kites,
the sated life of rock and feather.
Published: Rockvale Review, Spring 2019.
This poem was written in Fall 2018 at Poets on the Coast, a women’s poetry retreat in LaConner, Washington. The day before, we had made boxes that contained collages of objects and words that were significant to us in terms of our memories and creative lives. Then we had to choose someone else’s box, take extensive notes about it, and write a poem based on those notes. This poem, among the first I wrote when I “came back” to writing poetry and the first I published in that chapter of my life, gave me the opportunity to express my desire to be a poet and my fears about claiming that identity.
What Inspires You
I am inspired by nature, always. I am inspired to write in the passenger seat of a moving vehicle or on a moving train (if it’s not too crowded). I am deeply inspired by language and its expert usages, and so I love writers that span the gamut from Wordsworth and George Eliot to Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster, and from W. B. Yeats and Stevie Smith and Phillip Larkin to Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. On this side of the pond, I love the way the following writers use language: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, Margaret Atwood, Tim O’Brien, Barbara Kingsolver, Anthony Doerr, Jack Gilbert, Stanley Kunitz, Traci K. Smith, Mark Jarman, Natasha Trethaway, Danusha Lameris, Ada Limon, Eduardo C. Corral, and more.
Bio
Annette Sisson’s poems appear in Penn Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, Cider Press Review, West Trade Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, was published by Terrapin Books (2024), and her third, Rhizomes and Bones, was named “runner-up” in the Cider Press Book Award. In 2019, she won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize. In 2024 and 2025, she was a finalist for the Charles Simic Poetry Prize, and in 2025, her poems were named finalists in River Heron Review’s and Passager Magazine’s poetry contests. More than a dozen have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Find the Spring 2026 Issue HERE
Previous NPM 2026 poets
| April 1 | Amy Forstadt |
| April 2 | Annette Sisson |